Happy New Year and Happy New Decade Greetings from Gizmo [1]
Another year has passed, and a new decade awaits us.
Some say this will be the most significant decade in more than 100 years. By the end of it we will probably know the direction Western civilisation will be heading for the rest of the 21st century. And the news may not necessarily be good even though we all hope dearly that it will.
Sitting here in Sydney Australia today I am surrounded by thick smoke from the scores of bushfires burning throughout the State. Hundreds of homes have been lost and sadly many lives. Ominously the weather forecast for the coming weekend suggests the carnage is not yet over. Thankfully I’m located in a relatively safe area though with these wild fires and catastrophic weather, the truth is nobody is truly safe.
Like the fires in California last Summer, these fires are unprecedented. The warming of the Arctic is unprecedented. The droughts in sub-Saharan Africa and the lower half of South America are unprecedented.
Now this is not an essay on climate change. Rather the point is that we demonstrably live in unprecedented times. And in a world of such grave uncertainty, nobody can predict what the 2020s will bring.
That same situation applies to the Internet. The invasion of our privacy is unprecedented as is the wealth, power and dominance of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. Also unprecedented is lack of will from National Governments to reign in the excesses of these corporations.
If I awoke one morning in 2025 to hear the news that the internet had been sold to the tech giants, I would not be totally surprised. That’s because we live in times where anything seems possible however outrageous. Now I don’t think this will happen and dearly hope that it won’t, but the point is that it could.
This sounds pessimistic but the very same uncertainty could also lead to some unexpectedly positive developments in the 2020s. For example, there is growing consensus that many of the negative impacts of the internet are a direct consequence of the dominance of advertising. I fully agree, and in initiatives like the rewards tokens model being used in the Brave Browser, you can see the possible emergence of alternative funding models. Indeed, the Gizmo’s Freeware website survives largely on voluntary donations rather than advertising alone.
So, let’s hope that in the 2020s the age of advertising dominance of the internet will pass and with it the evils and excesses that have flowed from it. If that is the future of the internet, then we all can look forward to it.
But the future is the future and now is now so on behalf of all the volunteers who keep the Gizmo’s website going, may I wish you and all our valued site visitors, peace, good health and prosperity in 2020.
Gizmo